<b><i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • From former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins comes a twelfth collection of poetry offering over fifty new poems that showcase the generosity, wit, and imaginative play that prompted <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> to call him “America’s favorite poet.”</b><br>  <br> <i>The Rain in Portugal</i>—a title that admits he’s not much of a rhymer—sheds Collins’s ironic light on such subjects as travel and art, cats and dogs, loneliness and love, beauty and death. His tones range from the whimsical—“the dogs of Minneapolis . . . / have no idea they’re in Minneapolis”—to the elegiac in a reaction to the death of Seamus Heaney. A student of the everyday, Collins here contemplates a weather vane, a still life painting, the calendar, and a child lost at a beach. His imaginative fabrications have Shakespeare flying comfortably in first class and Keith Richards supporting the globe on his head. By turns entertaining, engaging, and enlightening, <i>The Rain in Portugal</i> amounts to another chorus of poems from one of the most respected and familiar voices in the world of American poetry.<br>  <br><b>Praise for <i>The Rain in Portugal</i></b><br> <b> </b><br> “Nothing in Billy Collins’s twelfth book . . . is exactly what readers might expect, and that’s the charm of this collection.”<b>—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br>  <br> “This new collection shows [Collins] at his finest. . . . Certain to please his large readership and a good place for readers new to Collins to begin.”<b>—<i>Library Journal</i></b><br>  <br> “Disarmingly playful and wistfully candid.”<b>—<i>Booklist</i></b>